unified communications

Cisco talks cloud offerings, focuses on Microsoft, Google

Cisco is talking a lot at its annual user conference, Cisco Live, but it’s not always being definitive. Cisco is said to be considering an expansion to its WebEx collaboration suite to include document authoring and management that would compete, in part, with Microsoft Office, but also with Google Docs and other online applications. Cisco also said it would be virtualizing voice and making it a cloud offering, and announced some WebEx support for private clouds, departing from its original strategy to support it only as a Cisco-hosted service.

The moves come as Cisco reorganizes its development council along more traditional lines (enterprise/commercial, service provider, consumer) and largely eliminates the high-level software group that contained the WebEx products. Cisco is shifting its original everything-hosted strategy to a hybrid-cloud model in our view, which is smart given that’s what enterprises want. The question is whether Cisco wants to be the public part of the hybrid cloud or wants to empower service providers to take that role.

The comments made by Cisco’s CTO suggest that Cisco doesn’t want to be an infrastructure-as-a-service provider but isn’t ruling out platform-as-a-service and certainly not SaaS. Cisco also indicated it was ready to meet the challenge of Google Voice and Google Wave in Unified Communication, which at least shows that Google knows that Wave and Voice are UC challenges. We wonder if Cisco might not get too diverted in a battle with Google; it would be better to simply adapt Cisco UC to work inside Wave and to integrate it with Voice using APIs.

Google Voice “UC” offers telecom-providers major angst

Google is now starting to admit new users to Google Voice, and the new offering is certainly a step that will give telcos worldwide some major angst. Google Voice is a free service that provides a single number, voicemail, free calling in the U.S., call screening and blocking, SMS alerts, email delivery of voicemail, rings on multiple phones, changes phones in mid-call, etc.

The new offering is surely a version of a unified communications product hosted on the Internet and it competes with nearly all of the telco advanced voice features. It also seems to signal Google’s entry into more traditional services. What the business model for this will be is very hard to say, but the offering certainly puts pressure on telcos to come up with a better (which is to say ANY) service-layer strategy.

Google’s Wave: Early assessments a bit “off”

Google’s Wave is gathering a lot of comment, but in our view, much of it is missing the key points about the notion. Part of that problem lies with Google’s own positioning of Wave, which some believe may have been rushed into public view to overhang Microsoft’s Bing announcement. We’re not so sure.

This month in our Netwatcher newsletter we’ll be taking a look at Wave, and we’re offering a short TMT Advisor Planners’ Briefing for those who registered for the service.

Wave is an architecture, not a replacement for email or even IM, as some suggest. It is the first example of a rich, federated, OTT service, and as such it could be a total game-changer for everything from unified communications and collaboration to IMS, TMF, and ITU NGN.

Does Google get all of this, or are we just being an alarmist? That’s for the future to determine. Meanwhile, we recommend everyone take a very hard look at the true details and not base their perceptions on the coverage.

Google’s Wave redefines UC market; challenges Twitter?

Google may not be saying it, but they’ve just showed their hand in (and maybe redefined) the UC market. Google Wave, announced at the Google development conference, blends social network frameworks and policies with IM and email.

We’re hearing that Google will also be integrating voice and video communications with Wave, and the fact that they made the announcement at a developer conference shows that Google is planning to pull in support from third parties to enhance Wave’s capabilities.

We’ve commented for some time that communications needed to be built around a new social network framework and not just around voice calling, and Google seems to be doing just that. Wave is a kind of smart document that carries communications along with it, facilitating its own collaborative framework. Thus, it is something like a service template and something like a business document or personal letter/email combined.

The problem is that Wave won’t be available until late 2009 at the earliest, according to the rumors we’ve heard. That means that there’s plenty of time for others to jump in and make some of the same points—and maybe faster. Based on what was said at the developer conference, it’s hard to see how Google could advance their timetable.

Microsoft and HP join UC hosted service trend

Microsoft and HP announced a major partnership in unified communications (UC) building on HP’s ProCurve blades and Microsoft’s UC and collaboration software tools. The two companies articulated a vision of communications as something more virtualized than tied to an appliance, a story that’s not unlike that being told by Cisco and one likely to be advanced further by Oracle. The deal is most likely a part of the overall trend we’ve discussed before; IT and networking players are fighting for the middle zone of hosted service features where much of the future value of both networking and IT will lie.

Hosting UC in the cloud: Not only for the enterprise

In his VoiceCon keynote, Siemens CEO O’Neill announced a deal to run Siemens OpenScape software on the Amazon EC2 cloud. The move is a very important step in our view because it illustrates that the cloud could well become a major repository for service features and create an implementation of the new service layer.

OpenScape is an enterprise server-based UC system of course, but if it can be hosted on a cloud, so could a provider-based system. The choice of EC2 is also enlightening; the Amazon model has become everyone’s darling, and we believe that it’s currently the best out there.

Telepresence: A hotel-based services options

AT&T is expanding the commitment it’s made to Cisco Telepresence by doubling the number of conference rooms available. AT&T offers a managed conference service based on Cisco’s high-end technology.

The high-end telepresence market has always been dependent on “room-package” solutions like this, according to our research, because only the largest firms can afford and/or justify a private solution. Even the room-package approach isn’t populist enough for the great majority of businesses, however. Among the 3,500 largest enterprises, we calculate about a quarter could justify some in-house facilities and more than 90% of the remainder could use room-based services. In the next tier of the market (5,000 worldwide), only a tenth can justify private facilities, and only 40% can use room-based services.

A broader approach is needed to gain full market acceptance. Our research shows that the most significant shift would be hotel-based conference facilities, because they could be more easily reached because of greater ubiquity. These should also offer lower-cost service than the high-end Cisco approach.

Cisco’s blade aspirations short on software?

Cisco’s new blade offering, Project California, is likely to be strong on blade and short on software other than UC. This could be a shortcoming that will make Cisco more vulnerable to competition than even some incumbent players might be. Cisco’s project has leaked out for a year or more, giving people plenty of time to position against it.

Dell recently commented extensively on its own view, which might be described as a “blade ecosystem” approach that would involve not only hardware but software and management tools. The implication is that Cisco won’t go there, but we find that very hard to believe given Cisco’s recent software push and the fact that it has management software tools already. In addition, rumors Cisco might even buy VMware have continued to swirl. We think that Cisco’s launch of a blade server would likely come when market conditions appear to be easing, but it may make some M&A moves much earlier.